As is known to those skilled in the art, modern surgical techniques typically employ radio frequency (RF) cautery to cut tissue and coagulate bleeding encountered in performing surgical procedures. For historical perspective and details of such techniques, reference is made to U.S. Pat. No. 4,936,842.
As is known to those skilled in the medical arts, electro-surgery is widely used and offers many advantages including that of the use of a single surgical tool for both cutting and coagulation. Every electrosurgical generator system, to be fully used, must have an active electrode which is applied by the surgeon to the patient at the surgical site to perform surgery and a return path from the patient back to the generator. The active electrode at the point of contact with the patient must be small in size to produce a high current density in order to produce a surgical effect of cutting or coagulating tissue. The return electrode, which carries the same current as the active electrode, must be large enough in effective surface area at the point of communication with the patient such that a low density current flows from the patient to the return electrode. If a relative high current density is produced at the return electrode, the temperature of the patient's skin and tissue will rise in this area and can result in an undesirable patient burn.
In 1985, the Emergency Care Research Institute, a well known medical testing agency published the results of testing they had conducted on electrosurgical return electrode site burns, stating that the heating of body tissue to the threshold of necrosis occurs when the current density exceeds 100 milliamperes per square centimeter.
The Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation has published standards that require that the maximum patient surface tissue temperature adjacent an electrosurgical return electrode shall not rise more than 6 degrees Celsius under stated test conditions.
Over the past twenty years, industry has developed products in response to the medical need for a safer return electrode in two major ways. First, they went from a small, about 12.times.7 inches, flat stainless steel plate coated with a conductive gel, that was placed under the patient's buttocks, thigh, shoulders, or any location where gravity can ensure adequate contact area to a flexible foam-backed electrode. These flexible electrodes which are about the same size as the stainless steel plates, are coated with a conductive or dielectric polymer and have an adhesive border on them so they will remain attached to the patient without the aide of gravity and are disposed of after use. By the early 1980's, most hospitals in the United States had switched over to using this type of return electrode. These return electrodes are an improvement over the old-steel plates and resulted in fewer patient return electrode burns but have resulted in additional surgical costs in the United States of several tens of million dollars each year. Even with this improvement, hospitals were still experiencing some patient burns caused by electrodes that would accidentally fall off the patient during surgery.
Subsequently, there was proposed a further improvement, an Electrode Contact Quality Monitoring System that would monitor the contact area of the electrode that is in contact with the patient and turn off the electrosurgical generator whenever there was insufficient contact area. Such circuits are shown, for example, in U.S. Pat. No. 4,231,372. This system has resulted in a much greater reduction in patient return electrode burns but requires a special disposable electrode and an added circuit in the generator which drove the cost per procedure even higher. Today, fifteen years after this system was first introduced, fewer than 40 percent of all the surgical operations performed in the United States use this standard of safety because of its high costs.